[Third Person - Secure Video Conference Channel]
Director Alvarez's image vanished, returning the screen to a plain black background with the Foundation emblem. In Alvarez's office, silence was absolute as Fox One and Dr. Thorne left to carry out their new, grim directives. But thousands of miles away, in their respective secure locations, the encrypted communication channel between Dr. Gears and Dr. Bright remained open.
An uncomfortable silence stretched between the two. Gears, as always, seemed perfectly content saying nothing, processing the report's data with the impassivity of a supercomputer. Bright was about to end the connection with a perfunctory click when his voice, stripped of its usual manic cheerfulness, stopped him.
"Hold on, Gears. Just a moment."
Gears paused his hand over the interface control. He said nothing, but his inaction was an invitation to continue.
Bright leaned back in his chair, the SCP-963 amulet hanging from his neck and catching the light. For the first time in the entire meeting, he didn't appear as a chaotic jester or a mad scientist. He looked old. Tired. The weight of countless lives and forbidden knowledge seemed to accumulate on him.
"The phrase," Bright said, almost to himself. "I'm obsessing over the phrase."
"The message's content has been deemed secondary to the subject's anomalous capabilities," Gears replied, his voice a perfect monotone. "Dr. Thorne's psychological analysis was exhaustive but inconclusive without further data."
"I know, I know," Bright retorted, waving a hand impatiently. "But she was right about something. 'The horrors of the Foundation.' Not 'the horrors the Foundation contains.' Not 'the anomalies under our care.' The phrase implies that we are the origin. The source."
"A standard Chaos Insurgency propaganda tactic," Gears recited. "Designed to erode morale and sow discord. Predictable."
"Normally, yes. I fully agree," Bright said, but his gaze was distant, focused on a far-off, unpleasant memory. "But what if it's not propaganda? What if the one who wrote that... or the one who dictated it to our mysterious POI... literally believes it? What if, to them, it's historical fact?" His voice dropped to a whisper, a hoarse murmur barely picked up by his terminal's high-sensitivity microphone.
"...and if that's the case, I think I know where they got those 'horrors.' And I pray to a god I don't believe in that my assumption isn't correct..."
The channel, which was supposed to be closed to third parties, suddenly sprang to life. Director Alvarez's stern face reappeared on the screen, his dark eyes fixed on Bright with scorching intensity. Beside him, Dr. Thorne's face also appeared, her clinical calm broken by evident confusion and alarm. They had been listening. Monitoring the "dead" channel just in case.
"Dr. Bright," Alvarez's voice was as sharp as an obsidian scalpel. "Your line was not properly terminated. You were in the middle of a statement. I order you, under the authority of a Site Director and with the security classification of this call, to repeat it. What exactly were you referring to?"
Bright started, surprised. For a moment, his jester mask returned. "Fausto! What a surprise! Just an old man rambling. Idle speculation, you know how I am. A wandering mind is a playground for brilliance!"
But his tone was forced. The joviality didn't reach his eyes, which remained shadowed by his previous thought.
"No," Gears' flat voice interjected. His colleague's analysis had kicked in. "Dr. Bright. You are typically prone to hyperbole and non-linear digression. However, your current tone deviates from established parameters. SCP-963's biosensor, which as you know is linked to this terminal, indicates a 15% increase in heart rate and a galvanic skin response consistent with acute stress, not creative excitement. Your facial microexpressions indicate fear. You are withholding data relevant to an active threat. Provide the information."
Bright was trapped. Alvarez's authority on one side, Gears' ruthless logic on the other. The smile finally vanished from his face completely. He let out a long sigh, the sound of genuine defeat.
"Damn it, Gears," he muttered. "Sometimes I hate you." He looked at the three faces watching him, waiting. "Alright. But let it be noted that this is Level 5 speculation. It's based on a file that most of us are privileged to have never read. A file the O5 Council itself sealed under a 'Forget Only' order."
He leaned forward, and his voice turned grim. "We're not talking about an SCP you can lock in a box. We're talking about SCP-5000."
The name dropped into the conversation like a stone into a pond. Dr. Thorne gasped, recognizing the designation. Alvarez's face hardened further. Even Gears seemed to... process the information with a deeper stillness.
"SCP-5000 isn't an object," Bright continued, his voice that of a horror storyteller. "It's a record. A black box, recovered from the wreckage of an anomalous exclusion suit. Inside the suit, we found the corpse of a man named Pietro Wilson. And within the suit's logs... we found the chronicle of a reality that committed suicide."
He took a sip of water from a nearby glass. "According to Wilson's logs, in his timeline, the SCP Foundation—our Foundation—suddenly and without warning, declared war on the human race. Not a nation, not a group. All of humanity. It was unanimous. The O5 Council, site directors, researchers... everyone was in agreement. And they began a systematic global extermination campaign."
Director Alvarez's office, already cold, seemed to drop another ten degrees.
"They released everything," Bright said, his gaze distant. "Every Keter entity, every Euclid monster, every deadly anomaly we've spent a century locking up. But they didn't just release them. They weaponized them. They used SCP-682 as an unstoppable siege engine. They used other SCPs' reality-altering powers to wipe cities off the map. They became, literally, 'the horrors of the Foundation' unleashed upon the world. They became the apocalypse."
"Why?" Dr. Thorne whispered, her scientific training battling against the magnitude of what she was hearing. "What was the logical justification?"
Bright looked at her, and his eyes were filled with an ancient sorrow. "Ah, there's the true terror of SCP-5000, Doctor. The part that keeps you up at night. Pietro Wilson's logs were fragmented, but what he could piece together was that the Foundation... we... discovered something. A fundamental truth about humanity. Something inherent to us. In our DNA, in our collective consciousness, in our very existence. Something so horrifying, so repulsive, so utterly monstrous, that the only logical response, the only moral action the Foundation could conceive... was the total annihilation of the species."
He connected the pieces for them, his voice barely a whisper. "Our ghost's speech. 'We created logic out of the illogical.' What logic could be more twisted and terrible than that? The decision that your sacred mission to protect humanity must be abandoned because humanity itself is the ultimate disease that must be contained... permanently."
A deathly silence fell over the channel. Director Alvarez stared into nothingness, his strategist's mind reassembling every interaction, every report, under this new, monstrous light. The Chaos Insurgency... what if their name wasn't just bravado? What if they were literally an insurgency against a coming chaos, a war against a logic not yet born in their own reality? Their brutal methods, their fanaticism... could they be the desperate actions of people who had seen the end of the world at the hands of their former masters?
Dr. Thorne felt lightheaded. This wasn't mere data. It was an apocalyptic-class memetic agent. The idea that the Foundation, her employer, her calling, her entire world, could become the ultimate villain... it was a poison to the soul, a crack in the foundations of her reality.
Even Gears seemed affected. His impassivity was now an enigma. Was he processing the threat or the paradox? Primary Protocol: Secure, Contain, Protect humanity. What happens when that protocol conflicts with a hypothetical discovery that redefines "humanity" as the ultimate threat to be contained... permanently? Dr. Gears' silence was, in that moment, more eloquent than any speech.
Bright delivered the final blow, his voice tired but clear, laying bare the thought that had been tormenting him since he heard the transmission.
"I don't believe POI-7713 is a simple Chaos Insurgent who was given a good speech," he said quietly. "Think about it. He appears out of nowhere in a locked room. He survives death, like a video game character reappearing at a checkpoint. His abilities are anomalous. His knowledge is intimate."
He looked directly into the camera, as if he could see through it and reach the very essence of their fear.
"What if he's not from here? What if he's not a soldier, but an echo? A refugee, flung into our timeline from the dead reality of SCP-5000, carrying the warnings and rhetoric of humanity's last stand? Or worse," his voice dropped even lower, "much worse... What if he's a probe? A kind of cosmic canary in a coal mine, sent here by forces we can't comprehend to see if our Foundation... if we... have started to reach the same terrible conclusion as the other one."
The question hung in the air, venomous and irrefutable.
In Site-██ Command Center, Director Fausto Alvarez looked at the large tactical map. The net of drones and MTF teams was closing in on a section of Level 3 service tunnels. The hunt for POI-7713 continued, an operation of precision and overwhelming force.
But now, the objective had changed. The red dot moving on his screen was no longer a terrorist. It was not a simple POI.
It was a ghost. A messenger. An embodied question.
And Alvarez, for the first time in his long and decorated career, wasn't sure if he wanted to know the answer. The hunt was no longer about restoring order. It was about containing a truth that could shatter his world from within.